Monday, May 08, 2017

Bitter coffee on the morning after...

I speak of what has come to be known as the collective French suicide, the still-birth (if not abortion) of what could have been the dawn of a Counter-Jihad of Le Pen...

An editorial today at the reliable (i.e., unlike Robert Spencer, actually anti-Islam) French site, Riposte Laique, had some appositely jaded remarks on this tragicomic opéra bouffe. The writer, Charles Demassieux, mentions the phenomenon that likely tipped the balance for this travesty, the "Generation Macron" -- i.e., young airheads (and their doting, envious elders) who naturally are saturated with PC MC (politically correct multi-culturalist) values; a generation their Left-leaning parents have told are the most beautiful and can do no wrong, as long as they rejoice in a life without restraints, and in a world without borders.

A generation which, like its Left-leaning forbears going back as far as the 1960s and 1950s (cf. the monumentally yeoman work of Bat Ye'or documenting decades of building a "Eurabia", going back at least to the post-WWII years), sees nothing wrong with an increasing Islamization of France, of the West, of the world. Not only nothing wrong, but positively virtuous.And speaking of that post-War generation, the PC MC that has become dominant throughout the West took different forms, with varying contexts, in different parts of the West. In America, Vietnam became one major lens by which the fanatical solar rays of Enlightenment became focused and then generalized; for France, this process began to devolve a couple of years earlier, with what is antiseptically known as the "French-Algerian Civil War", the French Vietnam, which in actuality was a ferocious Jihad waged by Algerian Muslims, torturing, raping and massacring not only their own fellow Muslims (of course) but most especially the French Colonials in Algeria who had cultivated a life and a society there, reflecting the 150-odd years of the colonization by France of that Islamic hellhole, bringing at least a measure of civility and civilization to a demographic too diseased by Islam to ever fully grow up, even under the benevolent tutelage of the civilized French.Speaking of diseased demographics, we have the French themselves, the majority of them (as with the majority of the West) ironically diseased by that neurosis that refuses to see how diseased Mohammedan society is and how superior by comparison we are. A refined sense of humility and self-deprecation is one thing, a virtue to be sure; but not when it has "evolved" so far it actually serves to enable those who hate you and are killing you and planning to kill many more of you until they drag you down to their hell on earth (or, when not killing you, are cleverly lying about it).This all reminds me of an old essay I wrote virtually a decade ago, What's left of the Left, reflecting on one of the pillars of the modern French Left, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Writing for that reliably squishy-soft publication of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Frontpagemag, Peter Berkowitz summed up what makes Lévy great in the eyes of the mainstream, but what we who have lowered our rose-colored opera glasses to see more clearly the strutting and fretting upon the stage, makes him symptomatic of the mass neurosis of the Age:To belong to the left is to
have inscribed in one’s mind indelible images of brave men and women
standing firm against the varieties of injustice.

The events —
the French capitulation to the Nazis that goes under the name Vichy, the
Algerian War, May 1968, the Dreyfus Affair — serve as a litmus test. A
man of the European left, particularly of the French left, Lévy
maintains, cannot be other than appalled by France’s World War II
collaboration with fascism; ashamed of France’s brutal efforts in the
1950s and 1960s to maintain control of Algeria; exhilarated by France’s
young men and women’s repudiation in May 1968 of authoritarianism in
politics and culture; and, looming over all, still scandalized by the
turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair, in which the wrongly accused Jew was
sacrificed to the interests of the state, tradition, and religious
prejudice.

Notice how the illustrious list of virtues smoothly elides the ethical horror at collusion with Hitler with the "shame" of defending civilization against the ferocious Algerian Jihad (the ISIS of its day), with the monstrous implication that the two are not polar opposites. What has happened to an otherwise cultured and bright intellect that can no longer see (or never saw to begin with) that in fact, to oppose Hitler is also to oppose Islam? That contorts the truth to such an inverse of itself that surely Orwell and Alice in Wonderland are revolving in their afterlives?

As I wrote nearly ten years ago:

Lévy
is hardly alone in this: the memory of the Algerian War of the mid-20th
century has become, for France, the PC MC equivalent of America's
"shame" about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's internment of
Japanese-American citizens during WW2, and America's "shame" about
Vietnam. I.e., it is a non-negotiable axiom of PC MC in France to
decry and feel shame about what the French had to do in Algeria. A man
of consummate reflection and intelligence, such as Lévy, apparently
cannot even accomplish the elementary operation of thought of which any
sophomore should be capable: to consider the context and the nature
of the enemy that is the principal feature of that context. The French
colonization of Algeria was the best thing that happened to that
Islamic hell-hole. For the century and a half that France ruled
Algeria, that Islamic hell-hole finally saw glimmers of social, legal,
political and technological progress.

I then went on to discuss why it was that France's beneficent rule over
Algeria began to fall apart in the mid-20th century, mainly to do with the post-War exhaustion and the broader disintegration of Western Colonialism that was already underway, probably reflecting the sea change in consciousness, the paradigm shift that resulted in the sociopolitical dominance of PC MC throughout the West, which now is stronger than ever, albeit running on the fumes of delusion like some Fukuyamish, neo-retro-Yuppie coke addict who can't face the fact that he's getting old and that perhaps he should pause, take a breath, and respect the past of his elders rather than continue accelerating into the manic-depressive Future that in its juvenophiliac dementia self-righteously believes it can fuse the breathless advances of digital technology with an obligatory (and ultimately narcissistic) "respect" for the most dangerously retrograde culture (Islam) on the planet.

While Lévy now and then over the years has
been somewhat commendable for his ability to cut through a certain layer
of PC MC bullshit about the Third World and Islam, his hangover about
Algeria reflects the underlying reason why not only the Left, but nearly
the entire West, cannot rationally think about, and act against, the
metastasizing global menace of an Islam Redivivus.

Afterthought:

Speaking of Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri Lévy, about ten years ago Jihad Watch had a lengthy report and Spencerian analysis of some symposium the two had (shudder), under the theme, "What Our Obsession with Islam Is Costing Us". Spencer's report (the reader must go here and then scroll down to find it) noted the added irony that although Lévy was so egregiously soft on Islam even Spencer had problems with it, that didn't stop Muslims from threatening him with death. Amongst the choice bits of nougat in Lévy's croissant noted by Spencer were his naive view that Muslims can (and even must) reform their own Koran in order to save us from their Islam; and his view that "Islamist"
extremism is a modern phenomenon fueled in one way or another by Western
forces.

I also noted in my old essay I linked above about this old Jihad Watch report that "if the reader scrolls
down the Jihad Watch article linked above, they will find this informative comment
about how Lévy stupidly befriended and supported the Bosnian Master
Jihadist Izerbegovic (in addition to supporting the Bosnian Jihad in
general)."

Unfortunately, not only does that link no longer work, but even trying to get to that old comments field through the "Wayback Machine" has proven fruitless -- thanks to Robert Spencer's tech genius, Marc, for making it either laborious or impossible for researchers to examine archived Jihad Watch comments of yesteryear. Way to go, Robert and Marc!

At any rate, I'll close this dismal post out with a final quote from my old essay, which naturally is still (indeed, with a vengeance) relevant ten years later, followed by a wash down my throat of the bitter froth of the last of my triple decaf jihadaccino (if not also -- Garçon! -- a bracing shot of cognac):

Someone as intelligent and well-informed as Lévy does not
become this stupid by inexplicably vacating his brain: this (and
innumerable other similarly infuriating examples that could be adduced
throughout the West) can only be explained, as I have reiterated
tirelessly in dozens of essays over the past two years at The Hesperado
and Jihad Watch Watch, by a complex psycho-socio-cultural sea change in
consciousness by which the West has come under the mainstream dominance
of a new worldview, a new paradigm -- Politically Correct
Multi-Culturalism (PC MC).

"what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. In her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye'or give no evidence of Eurabia, so..."

That's not a counter-argument to Ye'or's thesis. You'd have to show which claims of hers are "asserted without evidence" (and by "show" I mean quote the claims verbatim and provide page numbers).

As for the Gates of Vienna piece, I think they were using hyperbole with a strong dose of black humor; however, it's hard to calibrate where Gates of Vienna is relative to that hyperbole. The "Gates of Vienna Circle" as I have called it tends to be either as soft as the Counter-Jihad Mainstream on how bad the problem of Muslims is, or they lurch into conspiracy theory about some shadowy, nefarious, dastardly cabal of non-Muslim Leftists who are the "real problem".

For more on this, one could always take a look at my essay from over one year ago on this phenomenon: